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Obama's War

You might agree with the president that Afghanistan is the war we should have been fighting all along. You might agree with the prevailing military wisdom, that what we need to do there is what we (finally) did in Iraq: a massive infusion of troops and a clear commitment to “counterinsurgency.”

on a sunday afternoon the past fall, 22-year-old Private First Class Brian Thomas pulled guard duty, which sucks, as he’ll have you know. Two- or three- or four-hour shifts, staring at the same mountains and the same piles of rock. Maybe you sneak a cigarette, maybe take your helmet off, maybe lean forward and close your eyes for a few minutes, trying to remain conscious enough to wonder if that white Toyota Corolla snaking its way along the road in the distance is just another beat-up Corolla or if it’s on the BOLO (be on the lookout) list, and if that dirty-bearded goat-herding motherfreaker sitting like a gargoyle up there on the ridge is working with the driver and scoping you out and getting ready to run a car bomb up your ass. Probably not today, but who knows? You have to try and stay alert, have to pick up the binoculars every fifteen minutes or so, because one day they just might.

It’s Private Thomas’s turn on ECP, or entry-control point, which is military-speak for the entrance to the outpost, known as District Center Terezayi. Located in Khost Province in eastern Afghanistan, Terezayi is eight miles from the Pakistan border, which is an absolute nowhere land—beautiful, in its way, but nowhere, with muddy wadis and rubble-strewn valleys and distant mountain peaks and strange mud huts that bring to mind terms like prebiblical and Stone Age. It’s also the new front in America’s continuing “war on terror,” and the soldiers who are currently stationed here—and at outposts like this all along the border—are the beta-testers for how that war will be fought.

Not that Thomas is concerned with any of that right now. At the moment, in addition to thinking about the goat herder and the Corolla, he’s watching three of his fellow American soldiers hunt a pack of dogs in the valley in front of him. “The great dog massacre of 2008,” he says. A few months earlier, the twenty-five soldiers stationed here (they are responsible for patrolling 350 square miles, including a stretch of fifty miles along the border where Taliban and other militants pass freely) received orders from their battalion headquarters to kill the dogs around the base. They could be rabid, they posed a threat to the locals and the troops, and also they kept attacking cows and were just constantly barking their asses off. The catch was, the unit had adopted some of the wild dogs as pets, and they had to go, too. “We loved those fucking dogs,” Thomas says. After the purge, a new brood eventually appeared, and a new puppy was adopted, nicknamed Convoy Dog, and he was out there running around right now.

From where he stands, in addition to the valley that doubles as a firing range when it’s not the site of a dog hunt, Thomas has a view of a hill to the right, on which the Afghan police force has an observation post, and a hill to the left, beyond which a road leads toward him and the ECP. He can see the first checkpoint, about one hundred yards up the road, manned by Afghan Security Guards, a supplement force that has been trained by private contractors and hired by the U.S. military to help out here with security because the Afghan police are so bad at it.

As in Iraq, one of the guiding principles is that we can recruit and train security forces to take part in stabilizing their own country, which will eventually allow the number of U.S. troops to be drawn down. But the training has gone poorly. There are all sorts of practical problems, the main one being that Afghan police get killed at a ridiculously high rate. (Over the course of two years, they’ve lost an average of fifty-six men a month.) The other, more insidious issue is one of trust. In September an Afghan police officer turned on the Americans he was with and killed a U.S. soldier; in another incident in a nearby village, the Afghan police were suspected of burning down their own district center and pretending it was a Taliban attack. Plus, they’re corrupt, and they get paid almost nothing, and they have other issues—like, for instance, younger police officers at the district center are kept at separate observation posts from older police officers, because of the younger officers’ fear that they’ll be raped.

Thomas gets on his radio and reports back to the sergeant of the guard at headquarters that the men are out there shooting dogs.

“Say again?”

“Roger, they’re shooting dogs. Over.”

“Roger. Copy.”

Thomas is on his second deployment. “When I get back, I’m getting my ass out of the army,” he says. He’s from Big Springs, Texas, and he plans on using the new GI Bill to go to the University of Texas to study music, after he saves a little money working on an oil rig. He watches through his binoculars as two soldiers take aim with their M-4’s. Six shots ring out.

“They just killed Convoy Dog,” Thomas says. He shakes his head. “I automatically do not like that guy. That dog is domesticated, you know what I mean? That really irritates the crap out of me.” Another shot. “I’m depressed.”

Thomas was in the ECP when the base was attacked by rockets a month ago. Because of the echoing effect of the mountains, the loud explosions “scrambled my brains,” he says. They never got the attackers, even though the next morning they found a local Afghan civilian loitering out near where the rockets were fired. They swabbed the guy for explosives, and he came up positive, but they still weren’t allowed to detain him. The Americans operate under strict rules when it comes to engaging Afghans, and getting found near the scene of an attack and then testing positive for explosives isn’t considered enough evidence for detention. “It was frustrating,” Thomas says. “ ‘Hey, go ahead and hit us again! We’re not going to do anything!’ They know they aren’t going to get in trouble. They probe us all the time. A guy standing on the pile of rocks right there scanned my entire AO [area of operation]. I saw him standing up there, probing us like a champ. I picked up my binos, and he saw us and left. You know they’re getting ready to hit us again. It’s just a matter of time.”

throughout the presidential campaign, Barack Obama talked about how we “took our eyes off the ball” in Afghanistan and promised that after he was elected, he would focus on moving tens of thousands of troops into the country to fight the terrorists where they live. By some measures, that makes sense, since at least some of the guys responsible for the September 11 attacks are still operating near here. But if protecting ourselves from terrorists is the primary goal of American foreign policy, then is placing that many soldiers on the ground in Afghanistan the best and most efficient way to do so? “If our strategic aim is to beat the shit out of Al Qaeda, we don’t need an existential American combat presence to do that,” a senior U.S. military official who spoke with me on condition of anonymity said. “If it’s in our strategic interest to maintain stability in Afghanistan and along the Pakistan border, I think that having an existential ground-combat presence actually makes that interest suspect.”

It’s hard to make that case, though, because despite the rhetoric about changing course, so much of what we’re doing now feels inevitable, a natural progression of the decisions that have determined our foreign policy for the past eight years. In the immediate aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks, we acted on the belief that fighting terrorism meant invading Afghanistan—and subsequently Iraq. Overnight, invasion became occupation. And once we were involved in those occupations, we quickly learned that the people we were fighting were generally not the kind who would be plotting against America but were instead militaristic groups involved in their own power struggles (in Iraq, Shiite militias and Sunni insurgents; in Afghanistan, the Taliban and local warlords and mujahideen). Rather than reexamining the original assumptions, though, the U.S. military got swept up in developing a counterinsurgency strategy (which eventually we conducted with moderate success in Iraq). And thus counter_terrorism_** and counter_insurgency_ **became hopelessly confused. As one military-intelligence official put it to me: “It’s not about bin Laden anymore. It’s about fixing the mess.”

This winter I spoke with Michael Scheuer, a twenty-two-year veteran of the CIA who ran the agency’s bin Laden–hunting unit in the late ’90s and is the author of Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq.** **“In Afghanistan, I don’t think we have a clue of what we’re after,” Scheuer said. When I asked him what he would do if he were in charge of American policy, he explained that he’d inflict as much damage as possible on Al Qaeda now—through targeted air strikes and assassinations and Special Forces operations—and “get out in six months.” To actually “win” the war in any traditional sense—to crush Al Qaeda and the Taliban—Scheuer says we’d need “a force of 300,000 to 400,000, one that would go into Pakistan.” Since we’re not going to do that, he says, “why bother? We stayed way too long at the fair. We can’t redeem it.”

But redeeming it by now fighting the “good war,” as it’s being called, is exactly what we’re trying to do. One of the officers in charge of redeeming things, at least in the 350 square miles around DC Terezayi, is Captain Terry Hilt, a 32-year-old father of two from North Carolina. He’s the kind of sturdy and thoughtful, permanently even-keeled commander who embodies the best military traditions. This is the third year of the past five that Hilt has been overseas, but he seems free of bitterness and is still positive when he talks about his job. He has a regular habit of keeping his thumb pressed against his wedding ring, which he’s done since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, when he pulled off his gloves and his gold band flew off into the sand. By a stroke of luck, one of his soldiers found it in the dirt, and since then Hilt’s been paranoid about losing it again.

As Hilt explains it, the primary job of the men at DC Terezayi is to frequently go out on “show of force” missions to let the enemy know that the Americans are around. The other goal is to “separate the enemy from the civilian population.” In Iraq, that eventually meant paying the bad guys not to shoot at us and setting up smaller outposts that were more integrated with the population. But here, with fewer troops and an even more complex tribal system (it’s very hard to know whom we need to pay off), the agenda is more piecemeal—modest patrolling while keeping an eye on the various reconstruction projects that are part of winning over Afghan hearts and minds. Though “reconstruction” is misleading. Really, it’s straight-up construction: building roads (which cost up to $500,000 per kilometer) or schools that never existed to begin with.

It’s an accepted fact among Hilt and his men that the area they are responsible for is so large it’s nearly impossible for them to have any lasting impact. So they do what they can, going out each day as long as the wrecker is around to pull the MRAPs (the million-dollar armored vehicles that can withstand a roadside bomb) out of the mud if they get stuck, teaching the Afghan police how not to be fuckups, trying to resolve the occasional complex tribal dispute, and running into the enemy and engaging in battle with increasing frequency.

six days after the dog massacre, the sun is out again and the soldiers at DC Terezayi are preparing their trucks for a two-day stay at the border, eight miles away, where the plan is to check in on the Afghan Border Police. They’re fueling up and loading supplies onto their trucks when suddenly there’s a huge blast at the ECP and a funnel of smoke shoots to the sky. The private on guard screams over the radio, “Oh God, we’ve been hit by a suicide bomber,” and everyone starts to move, throwing their body armor and helmets on and sprinting toward the ECP. There’s gunfire from an AK-47, though it’s impossible to see who it’s directed at. The Afghan Security Guards come stumbling through the gate, carrying one of the guards, a teenager, who looks like he’s dying. They have an older Afghan man, too, a police officer, whose blood is running down his face. Specialist Daniel Allen, the unit’s medic, tells them to put the two men down, and he starts working on them, taking off their clothes, trying to find where all the blood is coming from. The kid has about forty or fifty small holes in him, made by the ball bearings that exploded out of the suicide vest. Doc Allen takes off the kid’s pants to make sure he hasn’t been hit in the groin, and the kid’s lying there naked and bleeding on a slab of concrete outside the motor pool, a white bandage pressed over his penis. One of his friends is kneeling by him and holding his hand.

Outside the gate, Sergeant Joseph Biggs is making sure no one else is hit. Biggs is a 24-year-old from Florida. He has over a dozen tattoos, including one on his right biceps that says war and one on his left that says kill, as well as another on his right forearm that spells out the Arabic word for “infidel.” He points to a live grenade on the ground, near one of the severed legs of the bomber. “He was about to throw that,” he says.

For forty-five minutes, they keep the kid alive, waiting for a Black Hawk** **helicopter to come in and take the two men away. After they leave, several of the men meet in the Tactical Operations Center, where Hilt is trying to piece together what happened. The suicide bomber came up through the valley between the two hills, he says. A group of five or six boys ran up and surrounded him as he approached the gate. The children are 8 or 9 years old and are regulars at the base. They come over most days after school, and the Americans give them chores to do, like filling sandbags or gathering up golf balls that have been hit into the valley. Most of the guys here like having them around.

The security cameras near the ECP captured the attack, and now four soldiers are gathered around, watching the footage as the bomber gets close to the gate (the kids, at this point, have run away, taking a seat on the Hesco barriers that have been set up as backstops out on the firing range). He stops outside the barbed-wire fence, and the young guard stands up and calls to him to stand where he is and wait to be searched. The guard moves across the screen from right to left, toward the bomber, and then suddenly stops and backs up, cocking his AK-47 and lifting it up to fire, and that’s when the suicide vest explodes. Smoke fills the screen and the guard disappears, then reappears, staggering backward and screaming before falling to the ground.

“We’re going to need to clean that whole yard,” Hilt says. “Once everyone is inside, I’ll talk to everyone real quick. We’re going to try to HIIDE him [identify using a retinal or fingerprint scan], if we can find the head. Hey, Sergeant Biggs.”

“Hoo-ah,” Biggs says.

“You said the head was out there?”

“No, just the scalp, just the hair.”

“The flesh out there,” another soldier adds, “it’s everywhere.”

“I guess we don’t bring them kids back no more,” Biggs says. “I always said with the kids around, there’s going to be some shit like that. The kids are the ones who brought him over here, the little terrorist bastards.”

The rest of the soldiers gather in the living room (or, as it’s known among the men, the MWR—short for “moral-welfare and recreation area”), where at night they watch DVDs and play the video game Rock Band.

“Everyone knows what just happened,” Hilt says to the group. “A suicide bomber at the front gate blew himself up. A couple things are going to happen. The kids that typically hang around were walking with the guy prior to detonating. They won’t be coming back here. The mission [to the border] is going to be off. Hey, what typically happens after one bomber?”

“Another one,” the soldiers answer in chorus.

“There are body parts all over the place, all through the district center,” Hilt says. “Doc, we got plenty of rubber gloves? We’re going to get some and do a police crawl across the DC. If you find fingers, any of that stuff, don’t touch it. Call for one of the HIIDE guys. We might be able to get it to hit on the HIIDE system.”

Hilt pauses and then adds, “Pictures. Do not be taking pictures of friggin’ body parts. You’ll get in a lot of trouble if you try to take pictures of body parts home. We got really lucky. Stay vigilant. Here’s the good news: The sandbags worked, the gate worked. Because of that, we’re not putting anybody in the ground.”

The soldiers pull on rubber gloves and go outside and begin walking slowly over the gravel, looking for pieces of the bomber. One soldier scrapes up a chunk of flesh with a shovel. “Mmm, pancakes,” he says. “Why the fuck couldn’t they have used a car bomb? I don’t mind cleaning up after car bombs. Everything’s burned up.”

They dump the body parts in a clear plastic garbage bag. The bomber’s legs are still there near the gate, intact from the knee down. His legs are hairy. He was wearing white high-tops with yellow stripes. The scalp is on the ground next to a Hesco barrier, a blood-wet mop of black hair.

Staff Sergeant Daniel Smith spots a blackened finger hanging off the concertina wire, and Staff Sergeant Aaron Smelley, who’s in charge of identification, takes it and places it on the portable HIIDE machine and presses hard to get a scan. After a few tries, he gets a reading, but the fingerprint doesn’t match any known terrorist in the database.

The Afghan police bury the leftover body parts a few hundred meters away from the base in a small cemetery. They place a pile of rocks on top to mark the grave, then lay the bomber’s yellow-striped high-tops next to the rocks. Later that afternoon, two Afghan men from one of the nearby villages come to look at the grave site. As they start to walk away, one of them turns back and picks up the high-tops and takes them for himself.

That night the dogs are back, barking and fighting over the bits of flesh that flew so

far from the base they were missed during the cleanup.

two days later, the mission to the border is back on and the MRAPs crawl out to an outpost called Border Security Point 7, BSP 7, an eight-mile trip that takes around two hours because there’s no paved road. It’s to the hills and caves along the border that Al Qaeda and the Taliban retreated during the 2001 invasion and where, to this day, Taliban leader Mullah Omar is said to be hiding, as well as Jalaluddin Haqqani, a former mujahideen fighter for the U.S. against the Soviets, who now runs a network of Afghan fighters closely allied with Al Qaeda.

Controlling the border with the supposed help of the Pakistani military is a major part of the newly intensified American strategy. Eighteen new border facilities have recently been completed, with 147 more under construction or in planning stages, costing upward of $845 million. Along with bringing an additional 17,000 American troops into the country, the goal is for private military contractors (formerly Blackwater) and DynCorp to train thousands of Afghan Border Police to help the Americans patrol the area.

When I met with Major General Robert Cone, he was the U.S. commander in charge of training all the Afghan security services, including police, army, and border patrol. “What I’ve learned about Afghanistan,” Cone told me, “is that if something is broken, somebody wants it that way. There are a lot of people who would benefit from not having border police”—drug traffickers, Taliban insurgents, Al Qaeda terrorists.

On the Pakistan side, for nearly three decades, there have been factions within the army and the ISI (Pakistan’s intelligence service) who are ideologically anti-Western and sympathetic to Islamic fanaticism (primarily because it represents a base of fighters to counter the historic threat from India) and who have done as little as possible to rein in extremists in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. Pakistan is nominally an American ally—we’ve given the military $8.7 billion in aid since 2002—but the country is beset with its own rivalries and factions, and there often seem to be as many enemies as friends. U.S. military and intelligence officials say there are camps of Taliban fighters out in the open, a few kilometers into Pakistan, and that the Pakistani military does very little to restrict them. Militants frequently attack the NATO supply convoys that run from Karachi up through the Khyber Pass; in a series of incidents last December, NATO lost 400 vehicles and containers.

From the top of BSP 7, the Pakistani military checkpoint is clearly visible. The sun is setting behind us, we’re about 4,000 feet up, and between the mountains, about two miles away, is a dark brown building that marks the official presence of Pakistan. I’m standing with Hilt and his Afghan-border-patrol counterpart, Captain Sadeq, who won’t tell me his last name because his family doesn’t know that his real job is commanding a company of Afghan Border Police on a mountaintop along the Pakistan border and not, as he tells them when he leaves for months on end, teaching in a school in Kabul.

Every few weeks, Sadeq explains, Pakistani and Afghan Taliban, along with soldiers in the Pakistani military, come over the mountain and take up positions and start shooting at them. “My informant [in Pakistan] calls me and tells when the Taliban are coming,” he says, “so we know when they are going to attack. The Taliban have a meeting in the day, and when they have this meeting, I get a phone call.”

Sadeq also says that suicide bombers are often ferried in along a path in plain view of the Pakistani border guards. “Pakistan doesn’t want Afghanistan to have peace,” he says. “Pakistan wants to keep Afghanistan unstable and destroyed.”

BSP 7 consists of just one small building where the border guards sleep, surrounded by a perimeter of sandbags and Hesco barriers with a steep drop-off all around that is littered with claymore mines. Earlier in the day, when we arrived, Hilt wasn’t pleased with what he saw. The place was strewn with garbage from one end of the outpost to the other, and there was also, as Sergeant Smith noted, “man-shit everywhere.”

The fighting position on the north side of the outpost, nearest to the Pakistani military checkpoint, was also wrecked. Plywood boards and sandbags had collapsed, and the Russian machine gun that had been set up wasn’t working. Hilt asks Sadeq why the most important fighting position was knocked down.

“A storm blew it down two weeks ago,” Sadeq answers.

“Why didn’t you fix it?”

“We were waiting for you.”

Sadeq is pretty sure that the outpost isn’t going to be attacked tonight. He didn’t get a phone call. But the Americans prepare for one anyway, filling up more sandbags and rebuilding the collapsed bunkers.

The sun sets and it starts to get colder; the night sky is filled with stars. The Americans settle into their fighting positions on the edge of the mountain. In a guard tower on the north side of the hilltop, some of the Afghan border guards start smoking hash. The smell wafts down to where I’m sitting with a few American soldiers, and we can also hear the electronic pings of an old handheld video game they’re playing. More confident now that the Americans are around, the border guards start yelling and taunting the Taliban, shouting into the darkness.

One of the guards thinks it would be funny to shine his flashlight down on us. “What the fuck are you doing?” one of the Americans yells up, and then says, “We need to get a translator over here to talk to these guys.”

A little later, one of the border guards appears in front of us and says to Biggs, “Hash is gooooood,” then makes a crazy face and runs away into the night.

In defense of the border guards, BSP 7 is the perfect place to get high. There’s no light pollution out here, just dozens of shooting stars in the crisp high-altitude air. The border guards spend two or three months at a time on this mountaintop with the constant threat of being shot or mortared, so why not get high? If you know your history, you could stare out and reflect on how Alexander the Great passed through here, how Rudyard Kipling’s tales were inspired by the adventurer who, disguised as a Mohammedan, stumbled through this very terrain, how thirty-odd years ago some poor Soviet bastards were probably wishing for a toke on this same mountain bluff after the CIA armed the mujahideen with Stinger missiles to blast their comrades out of the sky.

It’s a history in which the various occupiers who have tried to control this part of the world haven’t fared so well. And it’s a place where the disparate and often warring factions have never united around much except their shared desire to get rid of foreigners—most recently the Soviets, who at one point had over 100,000 soldiers in Afghanistan.

General David McKiernan, the American commander of the NATO coalition in Afghanistan, rejects the comparison to the Soviet experience here. “We’re not here to occupy the place,” he told me during an interview in Kabul last fall. “It’s apples and oranges.… We are winning in Afghanistan, but it’s much slower and much more uneven than anybody would like.” He continued, “I don’t have a specific time [for when we’ll leave]. We have a program to grow the Afghan army and police that will at least extend over the next three or four years. The additional forces would be provided in that same period of time. If you come back in three or four years and ask me, ‘Have we got to the tipping point?’ I don’t know if we’ll be. But we’ll have committed the resources to get to it. I think a lot depends on what happens across the border in Pakistan.” He paused for a moment and then added, “There’s no way this place is going to be the next Switzerland.”

at 10 p.m., hilt gives the order for all the fighting positions to fire off flares. The flares are green and yellow and red and go up in all directions, arcing this way and that, lighting up the surrounding moonscape. Two land on the dry vegetation 300 yards from us, and a number of bushes catch fire and go up fast, bonfires burning on the mountain side.

“That’s fucking awesome,” a soldier I’m sitting with says.

The flares let the Taliban know that the Americans are there, to lure them from their hideouts and into a fight. The Americans have a lot of impressive weapons lined up and ready to go: the Mark 19, which can fire grenades more than a mile, the M-240 Bravo machine gun, and a shoulder-fired antitank missile, as well as the heavy artillery they can call in to be dropped on top of the Taliban and blow the place up. Most of the guys here are itching to see the enemy tonight. “You finally feel like you’re doing your job,” Private First Class Julio Hurtado tells me as we slouch down behind sandbags. “You get to go after them.” He’s here, Hurtado says, “for the adrenaline dump. Winning or losing the war, it doesn’t matter to me.”

Around eleven, Hilt comes over to the position where I’ll be spending the night with two soldiers, Private First Class Cody Byrd and Specialist Jacques “Linny” Linnemeier. He sits on a green metal army cot that Byrd and Linny found and moved up to their position. “I think we’re going to be here for a long time,” he says, looking out into Pakistan. “This will be like the new DMZ.”

He means that the American military presence along this border is going to become more or less permanent, as it is on the thirty-eighth parallel in Korea. It’s the kind of “long war” that General Petraeus and his supporters continue to talk about. But many others, both inside and outside the military, think what that really means is a sort of half-assed colonialism. Retired colonel Douglas Macgregor is a widely respected military thinker who was integrally involved in planning the air strikes over Kosovo and who also advised the Defense Department on the second Iraq war. Macgregor is skeptical of, as he puts it, “the merits of wasting more blood and treasure in the Islamic world.” In an e-mail he sent me this winter, he wrote: “I receive a great deal of feedback from officers who’ve served in Iraq and Afghanistan. With very few exceptions, they tend to regard operations in these places as colonial expeditions against weak peoples mired in failed cultures and societies. In contrast to the British, who until 1914 extracted billions in profits from these ventures, most officers think we’ve simply poured our wealth into the sand.”

What Macgregor argues for, rather than a prolonged counterinsurgency, is “a strategy in which American military action is short, sharp, decisive, and rare. Such a strategy involves knowing when to fight and when to refuse battle.” Our counterterrorism should look more like America’s involvement in El Salvador in the 1980s, he says, in which we treated El Salvador as a sovereign state and did not flood it with American troops. (Counterinsurgency proponents like Petraeus look to less promising historic examples for guidance, like French commander David Galula’s fight in Algiers in the 1950s or the British campaign against Communist insurgents in Malaysia in 1960.) “The answer has always been low footprint, high impact,” he wrote. “The notion that we are going to field vast forces of riflemen with little or no protection, firepower, or mobility who will be Renaissance men—fluent in multiple languages and familiar with the complexities of non-European cultures—is simply nonsense. The idea these will be welcome anywhere in the non-Western world is foolish.”

At midnight, Hilt gets up and heads back down to the command post. The night drags on. At 2 a.m., it’s face-freezing cold. At four, even colder. Eventually, the sun starts to rise, and we pack up and get ready to go back to Terezayi. Byrd and Linny take down the Mark 19. The other soldiers are heading back to the MRAPs.

Around 8:30 a.m., a pickup truck full of Afghan Border Police drives past, heading to a checkpoint at the bottom of the hill. I’m throwing my gear into the MRAP when I hear an explosion, maybe a mortar or an RPG, quickly followed by three or four more. The truck carrying the border police has been attacked, and the Americans scramble to set up their guns again. An Afghan border guard, the one who last night had said how good hash was, stands barefoot behind a Soviet Dishka left over from two wars ago, firing wildly into the hillside. “Taliban! Shoot!” he yells, glaring at me. “Taliban! Shoot!”

It’s unclear if anyone has seen the enemy yet or if they’re just laying down suppressing fire. Hilt orders up air support, two Kiowa helicopters. I run to a fighting position occupied by Sergeant Biggs, Doc Allen, and another soldier, and stay there as the helicopters come in and make four passes over the ravine, launching Hellfire missiles and strafing with machine-gun fire. Each time the helicopters launch a missile, Biggs fires a single shot down into the ravine. “Hell, I might as well get mine in,” he says.

The fight lasts about forty-five minutes. Afterward the soldiers go on a foot patrol into the ravine, looking for bodies. There aren’t any. There are rocks and heavy vegetation and a few caves. I get the sense that we could have walked right past them. There are so many hiding places. The soldiers scan the ridges for a few more minutes and then give up and head back to the MRAPs for the slow crawl back to Terezayi. Hilt shakes his head and scans the landscape around us, a tiny portion of the 350 square miles he and his men are responsible for. “They’re already back in Pakistan,” he says.

michael hastings _is the author of _I Lost My Love in Baghdad. He last wrote for gq about covering the presidential primaries.

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